CHAPTER 9

The alkaline swindle

The first day of filming for the BBC’s Clean Eating investigative programme was remarkable to me for a number of reasons. First of all, as we were in California it felt almost like a homecoming of sorts. Well, we were in San Diego, which is more than 500 miles south of San Francisco ... but at least I was in the same time-zone. Second, I got to drive that Ford Mustang convertible for the first time in my life! I know, I know, boys and their toys, how very clichéd. Third, and most remarkable of all, was my surreal visit and interview with Robert Young at his pH Miracle Ranch.

Robert Young’s pH Miracle Ranch, also called the Rancho del Sol (The Sun Ranch), is an avocado and grapefruit ranch in Valley Center, North San Diego County, California. It is named after, and paid for by, his ‘pH Miracle’ series of books, of which Robert claims to have sold more than four million copies. Robert’s central thesis is that ‘the single measurement most important to your health is the pH of your blood and tissues – how acid or alkaline it is’,¹ and he believes that in order to maintain this perfect state of health, we have to eat ‘alkaline’ foods and avoid ‘acidic’ foods.

FIGURE 9 pH values of key substances

This is a story of that visit.

ALKALINITY AND ACIDITY

Just a very quick reminder to all of us who have forgotten most of our high-school chemistry: pH is a measure of the concentration of hydrogen ions (H⁺) in a solution; ‘p’ coming from the German potenz, meaning power or concentration, and the ‘H’ for hydrogen. The pH scale goes from o to 14, indicating how acidic or alkaline a solution is. The middle of the scale is 7, which is neutral. Any number below that is acidic and any number above 7 is alkaline. The scale is ‘logarithmic’, meaning that it jumps by factors of ten. So a substance with a pH 5 is ten times more acidic than a pH 6 substance and pH 4 is ten times more acidic than pH 5; while on the other side of neutral, a pH of 9 is ten times more alkaline than pH 8, and pH 10 ten times more alkaline than pH 9. So in reality, it takes quite a lot to shift the pH of a particular solution. The figure opposite shows the pH of some relevant solutions and substances.

Typical highly acidic substances are lemon juice, vinegar, our own stomach acid and battery acid. The highly alkaline end includes ammonia, bleach and sodium hydroxide, which are very caustic and thus often used as cleaning solutions. Black coffee and milk are slightly acidic; and blood, at pH 7.35-7.45, is indeed slightly alkaline, so Robert is at least partially correct in thinking of humans as alkaline beings.

THE PH MIRACLE

As I entered the house, Robert showed me around, past the empty spherical fish tank built into the wall on one side of the living area, and then into the kitchen, where he was keen I share his daily routine. Robert proceeded to thrust a large glass of dark green juice my way. I looked suspiciously at it and gave it a sniff, cognisant that being violently ill at the beginning of a visit was, ideally, not quite the polite thing to do.

Is this sweet or savoury?’ I asked Robert.

Instead of answering my question, Robert said ‘It’s wheatgrass ... Look, I’ll join you’. He had, sitting on the kitchen counter, one of these plastic water-bottles with a giant straw sticking out the top, that was filled to the brim with this green juice, from which he took an impressively large gulp. Robert didn’t go green and in fact looked like he was enjoying the drink, so I took a tentative sip ... and it turned out tasting like cold green tea. It was, as it turned out, quite pleasant.

Robert was about my height, had pale hair, almost bleached (I’m no expert but it looked to me like it was natural); and he had a trimmed moustache and goatee combo that was darker than his hair. He carried more weight around his middle than was healthy, but then again he was in his mid-sixties when I interviewed him, and given my own wobbly middle, I certainly shouldn’t be throwing any stones! Robert’s original pH Miracle book, which he wrote with his wife Shelly, was published in 2002.

‘I think I read somewhere ... you call yourself a “world renowned” microbiologist?’

These were actually Robert’s own words that I had read, right at the front of The pH Miracle.²

‘I don’t know that you need to put “world renowned” in front of it ...’

Robert claims a passion for biology, particularly the field of haematology, which is the study of blood. Robert’s interest in blood primarily revolves around its pH. Robert’s theory, which I want to stress was developed outside of the mainstream and at the edges of academic credibility, was that certain foods caused acid to build up in the body. If there was too much acid, then it couldn’t be balanced by the blood, and this acid ends up in our tissues. Robert believes that pH imbalance in our blood leads to signs of disease such as, low energy, fatigue, poor digestion ... foggy thinking, aches and pains, as well as major disorders’.³ He also argues that overacidity is what’s keeping (us) fat’.⁴ In contrast, maintaining the pH balance of blood is key to our health, leading to ‘energy, mental clarity, smooth operation of all body systems, clear, bright eyes and skin, and a lean, trim body’.⁵ He claims that with the programme in The pH Miracle, all this will be yours within weeks.

Clear bright eyes? What are we, Labradors? Trout?

THE ALKALINE DIET

Robert and I walked out of the kitchen and on to the patio out back, where there was a large swimming pool and, beyond that, a seating area with sun umbrellas and patio heaters. It was a warm and sunny day, and the whole scene could not have been more Californian if it had tried. It was heavenly. (As I am writing this exact sentence, I am sitting at my desk in Cambridge, looking out the window to a cold and dreary January morning ... I love it here really, but boy, do January and February days get me wishing for the sun, the sand and the sea.) When we walked past the pool, it was clear that the main residence of the pH Miracle Ranch was perched on the side of a hill. The ranch stretched for 46 acres down the hill and was covered in avocado trees. Robert pointed to the hills beyond and told me that Steve Jobs used to own an estate there. I did not fact-check that. As we walked along a landscaped path taking us down the hill, we passed gardeners pruning trees.

‘We’re right now cutting back the avocado trees. Avocado is what I refer to as God’s butter. So possibly the perfect food’.

According to Robert, The pH Miracle programme was very simple. Eighty per cent of one’s diet must be composed of ‘alkalising’ foods, leaving 20 per cent for ‘acid’ foods. The trick, of course, is to know what foods are alkalising and what foods are acidic. Helpfully, Robert has produced colourful and detailed charts. I won’t, however, reproduce any of these charts here for two key reasons.

First, while many of the charts attributed to The pH Miracle include a pH scale of sorts, going from o to 14, what Robert has designated as acid or alkalising has little to do with the actual pH of those foods. For example, he lists lemons and limes as alkalising, and thus good for you and should form part of the 80 per cent. I have no doubt that lemons and limes, packed as they are with vitamin C and other nutrient goodies, are fabulous for one’s diet. The problem is that vitamin C is known as ascorbic acid, and lemons and limes also contain citric acid (they are citrus fruits after all). As a result, lemon juice actually has a very acidic pH of 2. He lists all meat as being acidic, except for the inconvenient truth that meat contains blood, which is, as we have established, slightly alkaline. There are also examples of foods, which, according to Robert, change pH when heated. Robert argues that most foods get more acidic when cooked. Now, vitamin C is heat sensitive and tends to get destroyed in the cooking process. But that would mean, if anything, that citrus fruits become less acidic when cooked. He says that raw unpasteurised milk is neutral in pH, but becomes acidic when pasteurised. Milk is indeed slightly acidic with a pH of 6.5. But that is its pH whether or not it has been through the pasteurisation process, it doesn’t change. In fact, because pasteurisation reduces the number of living bacteria in milk, it slows down the fermentation process, which produces lactic acid. Then there are foods that appear to vary in their pH depending on their domestication status. For instance, ‘wild’ rice, which I take to mean is rice that comes in a variety of colours, is alkalising, whereas brown rice and white ‘polished’ rice are both considered acidic. These are just a few of the more egregious examples. But in essence, I can see no scientific rhyme or reason for what foods Robert lists as acid or alkali.

Second, even if you could bring yourself to accept Robert’s food taxonomy, it completely ignores the presence of our stomach, which at pH 1.5 is, by quite a long way, the most acidic compartment in our body. Thus, everything we eat, whether lemons, meat or avocados (God’s alkaline butter), becomes acidified by the stomach before it passes into the small intestine. I brought this fact up with Robert. His response, delivered with breathtaking confidence, was that the stomach was not actually acidic at all. It was the stomach’s job to extract acid from food as it passes through to the small intestine, which is the only reason it was acidic.

I was, in an extremely unusual occurrence, at a loss for words.

OUR BLOOD IS AT AN ALKALINE PH

Just so there is absolutely no room for doubt, the stomach juices are demonstrably and unequivocally acidic. The bottom line is, there is NO evidence, none whatsoever, that your blood’s pH can be influenced by what you eat. The pH of our blood is very tightly regulated, sitting as it does between pH 7.35 – 7.45; not by our diet, but by our kidneys and lungs through homeostasis. Homeostasis is the ability of the body to maintain stability within its internal environment when dealing with external changes. It controls much of our physiological processes, including, for example, our body temperature, our thirst, our hunger, our blood sugar levels, our blood pressure and our blood pH.

There is an easy way of raising the pH of your blood, and that is through hyperventilation. Carbon dioxide, when dissolved in a liquid, is acidic. The slightly alkaline pH of our blood is the result of, amongst many other factors, a carefully controlled concentration of carbon dioxide. When you hyperventilate or over-breathe, you eliminate more carbon dioxide from the blood than your body is producing, which results in your blood pH going UP; i.e. becoming more alkaline. Your body should normally attempt to compensate for this. If it fails, however, you end up with ‘respiratory alkalosis’, which include symptoms of dizziness, tingling in the lips, hands or feet, headache, weakness, fainting and seizures. Please don’t try hyperventilating at home.

On the other side of the pH scale is diabetic ketoacidosis. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune condition where insulin-producing cells in the pancreas have been destroyed. Normally of course, type 1 diabetics are treated with regular injections of insulin, so that their blood glucose levels are controlled. In untreated or poorly controlled type 1 diabetes, however, because your muscles and fat are unable to absorb any glucose, you would end up burning only fat, producing uncontrolled amounts of ketones. Because ketone bodies are acidic, a large accumulation would dangerously lower the pH of the blood, thus the name ketoacidosis, which if left unchecked can be fatal.

The bottom line is, in extreme cases when homeostasis fails, and your blood pH goes measurably above 7.45, such as in respiratory alkalosis, or below 7.35, such as in ketoacidosis, you will know about it. And if you don’t do anything about it pretty quickly, usually involving a trip to a hospital emergency room, you will likely end up dead. I think we can all agree that this could ruin your weekend and is probably best avoided.

SUPPLEMENTS TO HELP ACHIEVE PH BALANCE?

In addition to eating the alkaline way, Robert also recommends ‘high-quality’ supplements that help achieve and maintain pH balance. There are simply too many for me to list here, but here are the ‘stars’, which he recommends you should take every day:

a)Hydrogen-peroxide drops, which you should put into your water and drink at least four litres a day. It apparently alkalises the water and also releases O₂ to help kill terrible acid bugs. (Please don’t, under any circumstances, drink hydrogen peroxide; people use it to clean the wax out of ears, and it will result in an extremely unpleasant death if you get the dose wrong.)

b)Concentrated green powder from plants. This will largely be chlorophyll, which are the tiny organelles in plants that perform photosynthesis and is primarily what gives plants their green colouration. You apparently add a teaspoon of this stuff to your hydrogen, peroxide, treated water in order to gently pull your blood and tissues from acidic to alkaline, so as to help achieve an ideal pH balance. At the very least, this explains my wheat-grass juice experience. Wait, was there hydrogen peroxide in that drink?! Ack! Ack!

c)Multivitamin pills. Vitamins are nutrients that act as co-factors for a number of essential enzymes, and are therefore required for the normal functioning of our body. Robert argues that our modern environment, from the way food is grown to the way it is cooked and processed, has destroyed much of the endogenous vitamin content. This is simply not true. Discussing vitamin supplements in any useful manner would require a whole other book of its own. Suffice to say, while we all need a certain amount of vitamins, taking more than you need has no additional benefits, and in some circumstances can actually be harmful.

d)Essential fatty acids, such as omega 3 and 6. This is the one supplement I don’t have a problem with; although in reality if you eat enough oily fish and olive oil, you shouldn’t need more.

Incidentally, all of these supplements, and more, are available for sale on Robert’s website; all major credit cards accepted. A quarter pound (113 grams) of ‘green powder’, for example, will set you back nearly USD$40. Gosh, living the healthy and alkaline way certainly doesn’t come cheap.

PH INFLUENCE

At this point, we sat down to an alkaline lunch, prepared by Robert’s cook. We were joined by a colleague of Robert’s, a lady with long dark-brown hair, possibly in her mid-fifties, who was an expert at scanning your body to find patches of ‘acidity’. She did offer to scan me, but I politely turned down the offer. I didn’t want to have any of my unsuspecting ‘acid patches’ displayed on national TV, thank you. The director and crew cried off joining us for lunch, saying they had to work; they had to film the event after all. Cowards.

Lunch was, as it happened, very good. We had a very tasty vegan and gluten-free minestrone soup to start, a kale salad with a lovely sesame seed and olive oil dressing, and a gluten-free vegetable wrap with an avocado sauce (it tasted very much like guacamole but had the consistency of a thick soup). An alkaline diet essentially consists of vegetables, many of them raw, with little to no meat. It is gluten-free, and aside from wild rice and a few other oddities, is nearly grain-free and very low in carbohydrates. It also strongly discourages refined sugars and alcohol; and aside from olive oil, is very low in fat. As a result, the alkaline diet is undoubtedly very healthy. While it is not as extreme as a plant-based diet (hooray for avocados and olive oil), it is certainly not a million miles away, and is still very restrictive in what you can eat. What this means is that many people do end up losing quite substantial amounts of weight while following an alkaline diet. As we have discussed in previous chapters, weight loss is the most effective way to reduce your risk for a number of different diseases, so is always a very useful aim. The alkaline diet, however, is quite a complex diet, in that it is mired in obscure rules. Whatever you might think of ‘grain-free’, ‘gluten-free’ or ‘plant-based’ diets, at least their names are actually descriptive of the diet. There is however, no way of deciphering an alkaline diet from first principles, because it is not based on any principles that you or I would understand. You have to buy The pH Miracle, you have to refer to one of Robert’s many colourful charts.

Yet, in spite of its pseudoscientific complexity, the alkaline diet has had tremendous reach and influence, even extending to two key characters that we have already met in earlier chapters. For example, Bill Davis has an entire chapter in Wheat Belly (Chapter 8) that is entitled ‘Dropping acid: Wheat as the great pH disruptor’.⁶ Robert Young does indeed view wheat through an acidic lens. While in Chapter 10 of The China Study, Colin Campbell argues that ‘animal protein, unlike plant protein, increases the acid load in the body. An increased acid load means that our blood and tissues become more acidic’,⁷ which is, of course, consistent with Robert’s view. However, given that Bill advocates meat in a big way, who are we, the unsuspecting public, supposed to believe? Dr Davis? Prof Campbell? ‘Dr’ Young?

In the UK, one of the key promoters of the alkaline diet is Honestly Healthy, the health-food brand created by the duo Natasha Corrett and Vicki Edgson. In talking about one of their books, Honestly Healthy Cleanse, Natasha Corrett says about Robert Young:

‘Unfortunately, his work ... isn’t recognised by the medical industry, perhaps because giant pharmaceutical organisations wouldn’t be able to make money out of doctors prescribing vegetables’.⁸

Here we go again, yet another ‘health-food aficionado’ sticking the knife into ‘big pharma’. I was curious to hear from Robert about the spread and influence of alkaline living, and had brought along, more as a prop than anything, the health-food duo’s first book, Honestly Healthy: Eat with your body in mind, the alkaline way. I asked him if he knew of the people behind the brand, Natasha Corrett and Vicki Edgson.

‘Yes. Two of my students who have been studying my work for years. They actually called me when they were producing this book because they wanted my impressions on it’.⁹

Whoa, hold up there. That answer took me entirely by surprise ... it certainly didn’t come up in any of our research preparing for this interview. The manner with which he responded indicated to me that there was at least some truth to the statement. Director Tristan Quinn did not react, and Cameraman Kevin White and soundman Ali Pares coolly kept the camera and sound recording. I continued innocently.

‘So you saw a draft?’

‘Yeah, I saw a draft of the book. So I’m happy to help anyone that is interested in helping others feel better, look better and live a better life and it comes right down to food’.

When we got back to the UK, we spoke to the book’s publisher, who told us they never consulted Robert directly or sent him proofs. We reached out to Natasha, but she declined our invite to be interviewed on the programme. She later explained in a post on her Instagram account that she turned down our invite because ‘I wanted to have a chance to put my view across without it being edited in a way that could be misinterpreted or spun by anyone like before’.¹⁰

Sticks and stones, Natasha, sticks and stones.

In that same Instagram post, Natasha denied Robert’s claim that both she and Vicki were students of his, or that she had sent him proofs of their first book, and to be clear, there was no reason for me not to believe her. Natasha also said that ‘by no means is his [Robert’s] plan a basis for our brand! However, ‘... the alkaline way’ does appear in the title of Honestly Healthy’s first book and the Amazon website calls it ‘the original alkaline diet cookbook’.¹¹ They also put little pink hearts on each of their recipes to indicate the level of alkalinity; the scale goes from one to three hearts with increasing alkalinity, depending on the types of ingredients used.¹² The basis for this cutesy heart scale is the acid/alkaline food taxonomy set out by Robert in The pH Miracle, including considering lemons as ‘alkaline!

PLEOMORPHISM

Robert Young’s view that alkalinity is good and acidity is bad goes beyond food.

All sickness and disease can be prevented by managing the delicate pH balance of the fluids of the body!

Robert has based much of the ‘science’ of alkaline living on Antoine Béchamp’s microzymian theory.¹³ Pierre Jacques Antoine Béchamp (1816–1908) was a French scientist who did not believe in cells as the basic units of life, or that bacteria were one of the causes of infection and disease. Rather, Béchamp claimed that ‘molecular granules’, which he called microzymas, in biological fluids such as blood, were actually the basic units of life. In ‘favourable’ conditions, these microzymas would be turned into cells; however, in unfavourable host and environmental conditions, the microzymas would turn into bacteria and other microorganisms, resulting in disease. Béchamp called the process by which microzymas changed from one form to another, ‘pleomorphism’; essentially a form of spontaneous generation. Béchamp’s bitter rival at the time was Louis Pasteur (1822–95). Pasteur is regarded as the father of ‘germ theory’, that infection came from the outside. While he didn’t originally propose it, he performed the experiments showing that without contamination, microorganisms could not develop. Pasteur demonstrated that in sterilised and sealed flasks nothing would grow, whereas if he sterilised a flask and then left it open, bacteria and other microorganisms would rapidly grow, and in doing so proved that ‘germ theory’ was correct. He then went on to develop the principles of vaccination, microorganism-based fermentation and pasteurisation, which was only possible with the understanding of germ theory. In doing so, Pasteur comprehensively disproved Béchamp’s microzymian theory of pleomorphism.¹⁴ Yet today, Béchamp’s work continues to be promoted by a small group of germ-theory denialists (yes, they are a thing) and alternative-medicine proponents. They claimed that mainstream science of the time, led by Pasteur, waged a campaign to silence Béchamp, which is why germ theory predominates today. Included amongst these denialists is Robert Young.

Robert believes that under healthy alkaline conditions, the microzymas in the blood exist largely as blood cells. When one is eating acidic foods, however, the blood undergoes pleomorphism, and transforms into disease-causing bacteria. Robert claimed to have seen this happening in real-time, using ‘live blood analysis’, which was, as far as I could gather, putting a drop of blood onto a slide, and analysing it by staring at it down a microscope. Robert had actually posted a video online of ‘live blood analysis’ of a type 1 diabetic patient. He claimed it showed a red blood cell transforming into bacteria. I have had a look at the video and what I saw were unidentified cells, and something moving amongst them. I speak as someone who uses microscopes for research purposes. Typically, in order to tell what cells we are looking at, you would need to mark them somehow. Different cells will have different proteins on their surface, and you can target fluorescent antibodies that emit a known colour to those proteins. So you might, for instance, be able to distinguish different types of neurons, or neurons from non-neurons, or even see an infection by yeast or bacteria. Robert’s video provided no such marks, so there was no way to tell whether what we were looking at was blood, let alone if a blood cell was undergoing pleomorphism. Crucially, none of this of course was scientifically plausible.

When I posed this to him, he called it ‘the new biology’; he said it was ‘a new thought, a new consideration’. He talks about this ‘new biology’ consistently throughout The pH Miracle. These thoughts were, by definition of course, not ‘new’, based as they were on Béchamp’s thoroughly disproven 19th-century theory. In reality, these were just his fantasy. It was ‘post-truth’.

AN ADJECTIVE AND NOT A NOUN

The problem was that for Robert, clinging on to this debunked theory was far more than an academic exercise, far more than just some other kooky diet. He believed that he was on to something; he believed he could cure, nay, reverse disease.

‘Because disease is an illusion! In reality, what we call disease is the manifestation of the body struggling to prevent over-acidification ... of the body’s cells, tissues, organs or glands. Disease is the body in preservation mode straining to maintain the homeostasis of its internal, alkaline fluids’

Since Robert believed that all diseases were just a reflection of the spectrum of acidity in the body, if you follow his argument ad absurdum, then all diseases should be cured by the reversal of the acidity. This was where things shifted from eating avocados to something entirely darker. He began to believe that he could reverse cancer; that’s right, the big ‘C’. Below is an extended quote that I have taken from the ‘introducing cancer’ page of Robert’s ‘pHmiracleliving’ website. Google it, I am not making any of this up.

‘Cancer is the body in preservation mode trying to maintain its natural healthy alkaline design. So first, you must understand that cancer is unequivocally not a disease, but a symptom ... All conditions of cancer potentially can be reversed if the treatments are focused on the fluids and not the cells of the body. Therefore it doesn’t matter what the cancerous condition is, because cancer is not the cause but the effect of an over-acidic lifestyle and diet which is the cause of cancer’.¹⁵

Robert told me that he considered the word ‘cancer’ to be an adjective and not a noun; in other words, that it described the environment that enabled the disease, rather than the disease itself. Many of you reading this book will have been touched by cancer before, either directly or indirectly, and will find Robert’s view of cancer shocking, possibly even offensive, running, as it does, completely at odds to the medical consensus.

Where does Robert’s acidic view of cancer come from?

THE WARBURG EFFECT

Under healthy and normal conditions, an organ or tissue will stop growing once it reaches the appropriate size and shape. For instance, your kidney is kidney-shaped, each of the 206 bones in the adult human body have their own distinct shape but are yet comparable across all humans, and your stomach and intestine might be elastic, but still look like a stomach and intestine. Damaged cells might be replaced, but essentially once you become an adult, many of your organs will stay the same size and shape. What happens in malignant cancer, is that some of the cells lose their kidney or bone or stomach identity, and begin to replicate uncontrollably. This resulting tumour, if not stopped and removed, will often end up killing the patient. Cancer cells, no matter their origin, tend to grow and replicate very quickly and thus have a higher metabolism than the surrounding normal tissue. As a result, they take up and use a lot of glucose. In normal tissue, glucose is combined with oxygen within our mitochondria, the power packs of our cells, and converted into energy, in a process known as oxidative phosphorylation. In cancer cells, one of the results of utilising so much glucose is that some of the glucose is converted into lactic acid, in a process called glycolysis. This increased use of glucose and the subsequent production of lactic acid is known as the Warburg effect,¹⁶ named after Otto Warburg who made the original observations back in the 1920s. Thus, it is actually true that most cancers are acidic. Robert, once again, begins with a kernel of truth. However, where Robert gets it terribly wrong is that the lactic acid is not causing the cancer, it is being produced by the cancer. You can try and neutralise as much of the lactic acid coming from a cancer as possible, but that only removes one of the symptoms of cancer, it won’t actually stop the cancer.

THE FALL OF YOUNG

A large part of the pH Miracle ranch had been set aside as a ‘clinic’ to treat cancer. To the right-hand side of the main residence was a small road, which if you followed it upwards, led to a number of small bungalows, a treatment facility and even a tennis court. It was here that Robert brought terminally ill patients to stay at his ranch for months at a time. During their stay, he would ‘educate’ them about the alkaline diet and lifestyle, provide massages, and then either infuse them intravenously with an alkaline solution, or use the solution as an enema. This solution was made using sodium bicarbonate, otherwise known as baking soda, which has a pH of 9.5; it is the same ‘Arm and Hammer’ stuff you stick into your fridge to absorb smells. Nope, I am not kidding. He convinced himself and he convinced his ‘patients’ that the sodium bicarbonate would reverse the acidity of cancer, and in turn reverse the cancer.

Please, under no circumstances should you infuse yourself with baking soda, nor should you stick it into your ‘food to poop tube’, from either end. Should you mess up the concentrations, you would kill yourself.

When I asked Robert how many cancer patients he had brought in for therapy, he didn’t answer the question, but rather he said that he didn’t treat cancer, but only educated and helped people understand lifestyle and diet.

In 2011, unsurprisingly but not soon enough, Robert’s activities at the ranch attracted the attention of the Medical Board of California, which began an undercover investigation. They eventually gathered enough evidence to charge Robert. The district attorney’s office told us that when they searched the ranch, they recovered 351 files relating to patients, although not all were cancer patients. People, as it turned out, went to see Robert for all sorts of issues: diabetes, lupus, weight loss, seizures, autism as well as digestive problems. Investigators established that at least 81 of the 351 patients treated at the ranch since 2005 were suffering from cancer. None of the 15 whose prognosis could be documented outlived it. One patient, Genia, died from congestive heart failure – fluid around the heart – while being treated.¹⁷ As we toured the treatment facility, Robert showed us around one of the small bungalows where his patients would stay. We stepped into one of the bungalows as we were speaking of Genia.

‘Where did she die?’

‘Er, she died here’.

‘In this room?!’

‘That’s what I understand, yes’

This was the second moment in the day that took me and the crew entirely by surprise. As before, camera and sound continued rolling unabated.

‘She died here in this room?’

‘Yes that’s what I believe, yeah – I wasn’t here – I was out of town’.

It was a sweltering day with temperatures in the mid-30S and the air-conditioner in the room was turned off; yet I felt a chill run down my spine. An invoice, which we obtained, documented thirty-three intravenous sodium-bicarbonate drips, each charged at USD$550, over thirty-one days; some administered by Robert himself. The cost of the IVs alone was north of USD$18,000.

‘Who’s given thirty IVs over thirty days?’

‘They do that in hospitals through hydration but I’m not the doctor so I was not giving those IVs’.

‘So you’re washing your hands of all responsibility? Because you own the land – you own this space – this is your facility

‘I’m not taking – no, it’s not that I’m not taking responsibility that’s why I’m in court and that’s why I have this litigation, but no, I’m not – I am taking responsibility, you know, but the bottom line is, is that I ran a facility, er, for people to come, at their choosing, for a self-care programme’.

A self-care programme. I don’t know about you, but I would have thought that any programme which required someone else to stick a needle into your arm and run an IV would disqualify itself to be described as ‘self-care’.

Robert was convicted of two charges of practising medicine without a license, and was sentenced to three years and eight months in custody.¹⁸ As part of the sentence, Robert had to make a public admission declaring that he was not a microbiologist, hae-matologist, medical or naturopathic doctor or trained scientist. However, good behaviour will cut that custodial sentence in half, and he was also credited for spending a year under house arrest. So in reality, Robert will end up spending only about five months behind bars. By the time this book is out, Robert will once again be a free man.

THE ALKALINE SWINDLE

It was only the end of the first day of filming, and yet it had felt like a week; such were the revelations and range of emotions. Hellhole Canyon is a 1,907-acre nature reserve within a short drive of the pH Miracle Ranch. As we left the ranch after a surreal and shocking day, the crew and I stopped at a lookout point over the canyon to enjoy the beautiful sunset, the high clouds catching the colour, orange turning dark pink, and then slowly into dusk. It seemed an apt place to reflect on Robert Young’s alkaline swindle. On the face of it, an alkaline diet, which encourages the consumption of lots of vegetables with little to no meat, is undoubtedly very healthy. The problem, however, is that it is sold not as a largely vegetarian diet, but as a pseudoscientific movement based on a questionable food pH scale, where citrus fruits are considered alkaline when they are clearly acidic, and meat acidic when it is demonstrably alkaline. So where is the harm, as long as it encourages the consumption of more veggies? First of all, if there are actually biologically plausible reasons why eating more vegetables is good for us, why invoke some convoluted other explanation instead? The whole thing, to be frank, reeks of some cynical marketing ploy, designed to carve out a lucrative niche in a crowded vegetarian/vegan market. Second, and more importantly, is that there are always people out there who take things to the extreme. When pseudoscience goes beyond dietary advice about eating raw vegetables, not eating meat, drinking wheatgrass dissolved in hydrogen-peroxide-spiked water, and almost worshipping the avocado; and is used, instead, to prey on and manipulate the vulnerable and most ill in society, that is when people get harmed, people die, and it becomes a true problem.

I have been criticised for lumping Bill Davies and Colin Campbell together with Robert Young. People asked me how I could compare two ‘men of science’ who were trying to make people healthier by changing their diets with a madman harbouring messianic delusions and who was trying to cure cancer. Remember, both Bill and Colin reference the alkaline way in their respective books. Yes, it is true that Robert took things to the extreme, where Bill and Colin did not. But it was all still on the same spectrum of pseudoscience. Both Bill and Colin claim that their respective ‘grain-free’ and ‘plant-based’ diets have miraculous curative effects similar to the claims made by Robert about the alkaline diet. Robert just shows what happens when it goes one not very large step further.